A public park in San Francisco's SOMA district has been sitting closed behind a fence for almost all of 2017, with chain link fence segments installed in February replaced with a $145,000 black iron barrier in June.

Supervisor Jane Kim is at it again. Not content to rest on the laurel of her “victory” of making San Francisco City College tuition-free by introducing last year’s successful ballot measure W (dubbed the Mansion Tax), she’s found another way to make San Francisco more “affordable.” She recently asked the city controller to analyze the costs of providing universal childcare in San Francisco, and she plans to introduce a ballot measure for the November 2018 election that will offer “affordable” childcare for all. Kim wants a system that would reduce childcare costs for San Francisco families to just 10% of their income.

The next time you head down to The Embarcadero you may notice that Justin Herman Plaza will now be called Embarcadero Plaza. While San Francisco activists have no Confederate statutes to dismantle, the desire to “clean house” in a historical sense is sweeping the country, and San Francisco officials don’t want to be left in the dust. In July Supervisor Aaron Peskin introduced a resolution proposing to temporarily rename the plaza, citing Herman’s role in the displacement of minority residents, until a new replacement name can be decided on. The rest of the Board of Supervisors quickly supported the resolution by voting unanimously to rename the plaza. The late poet Maya Angelou, who was the first black female streetcar operator in San Francisco, is the name mentioned most often as t

In 1798, Thomas Malthus predicted that population growth would lead to mass starvation. If things had continued as they did for thousands of years previously, he might have been right. Fortunately, the advent of the Industrial Revolution dramatically boosted productivity, and gains in productivity haven't let up since. In recent times, global productivity has increased by an estimated 1.8% per year between 1964 and 2014. With improvements in technology and know-how, a single worker today can typically produce what it would have taken dozens to produce a few hundred years ago in the same amount of time, resulting in much better standards of living for most people than were the norm in Malthus's era.

A worker in the United States today earns more in 10 minutes, in terms of buying power, than subsistence workers, such as the English mill workers that Fredrick Engels wrote about in 1844, earned in a 12-hour day. Or to put it another way, "each farmer (in the United States) in 2000 produced on average 12 times as much farm output per hour worked as a farmer did in 1950." In other words, to produce the same amount of output, less than 10% as many employees are needed in agriculture as was the case half a century ago. And that's only over the past 50 years. Go back 200 years or more, and the gains are even more dramatic. While agriculture, once the occupation of 90% of Americans, has particularly benefitted from technological changes that enhanced productivity, many other economic sectors have seen similar increases.

So how have gains in productivity affected government operations – law enforcement, for instance? How much more crime do today's police departments prevent, with how many fewer officers, compared to their pre-Industrial counterparts?